I was sent an advance copy of The Pursuit of Something Better: How an Underdog Company Defied the Odds, Won Customers’ Hearts, and Grew its Employees into Better People and it’s a great read.

What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?

You bring in a CEO who has a passionate belief that the interaction between customers and frontline associates has the greatest influence on success and that the greatest impact on that is the way their leaders/managers treat them.

In other words, employees at every level do unto customers as their bosses do unto them.

Jack Rooney is as far from a  rock star CEO as you can get, but he understands that real leadership must permeate the entire company and knows that while true cultural change is neither fast nor cheap it works and therefore is worth the effort.

Rooney calls his approach the Dynamic Organization; he developed it under challenging conditions at Ameritech and brought it to full fruition at US Cellular, which he joined in 1999.

The Pursuit of Something Better tells both stories, Rooney’s and US Cellular’s; they are told by Dave Esler and Myra Kruger, the culture consultants who worked with him at USC and his previous company.

Both stories are the culmination of a man who believed in doing the right thing and a company that was changed accordingly.

“Jack Rooney and his slowly-expanding team of believers challenged the long-prevailing assumptions that business is a blood sport, that the advantage inevitably goes to the ruthless and the greed, that the only way to win is to hold your nose and leave your values at the door. He has proved beyond question, once and for all, regardless of what happens from her on, that a values-based model works, that it can raids both a company and the individuals who are part of it to undreamed-of-heights, to peak experiences that will last a lifetime and change the way those lives are lived.”

And while the authors do a great job of telling the story, the real leadership that Rooney provided, along with his concept of the Dynamic Organization, aren’t broken down or spelled out as a set of lessons and how-to’s separated for you to memorize.

It’s your responsibility to learn from what was done, drawing out those lessons that are most in synch with your MAP, because if they aren’t in synch there’s no way you’ll be able to implement them.

And in case you’re tempted to shrug it off as a fluke, I suggest that you give some long hard thought to Zappos and its ilk.

I highly recommend The Pursuit of Something Better. It’s fun, it’s fascinating.  You might even start to believe that you don’t have to leave your ethics at the door; at the very least you’ll know what to look for in your next interview.

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Image credit: Elser Kruger

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 1:30 am and is filed under About Leadership, Change, Communication, Culture, Leaders Who DO, Reviews & Recommendations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: cultural change, Culture, Dave Esler, Myra Kruger, The Pursuit of Something Better
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